In Enterprise Software, How Do You Stack up Against the Guy Down the Street?

McKinsey is out this week with a periodic survey of its McKinsey Quarterly readers called the Enterprise Software Customer Survey 2008.

Surveys are always interesting to users as a way to see how you stack up against your peers. They are always interesting to your IT suppliers because it helps determine what they concentrate on. So always be careful how you answer surveys; you might not get what you really need.

In 2008, you or your peers said the most important enterprise-software technology trends "impacting your business" were

software as a service (SaaS)

Web services/service oriented architecture (SOA)

offshoring/globalization

open source

software industry consolidation

"other"

(ranked in that order)

The changes from the last time that question was asked in 2006 were at the bottom of that list. Significantly fewer (assuming a normal +/-5 percent significance factor) of you are concerned about consolidation and significantly more are concerned about "other" issues. The rankings and percentages of the top four trends were unchanged in two years.

Two-thirds of all enterprise software budget dollars are still spent via traditional license/support contracts but SaaS is nearing 20 percent of the total. That total varies from 11 percent to 26 percent by size of company, as you would expect.

Give the report a quick read. It's always fun to see how you stack up. And if these trends aren't important to you, make sure your enterprise software suppliers know it.